Nigeria and its self-inflicted economic woes By Ope Babs.

The Nigerian economy suffers today not only because the past government/s spent money lavishly or looted the treasury but because the required manpower base was neglected.

Financial institutions focused more on large scale businesses for instant or low term profit rather than building the small scale businesses for long term benefits. They in turn borrows out their profit to other large scale businesses and had their monies trapped as unserviceable loans.

The government had been so lackadaisical about human resource development and strategic evolution of small scale businesses to save the country from both present and future economic ordeal. No little wonder that the Bank of Industry is operated on nepotism. They only dish out money to politicians and businessmen related to them. Banks of Agriculture are redundant and lack the needed strategy to motivate farmers to yielding high productivity level and ensure food security while their revenue base soars.

As an entrepreneur I was to start a business 8 years ago and having done my feasibility studies on the business, I approached a new generation bank and submitted my proposal to the branch manager myself. The start up capital was N850,000.00k. The bank manager was not satisfied with my projected profit. It was written all over his face that he was not ready to settle for such little amount. Just before my very eyes, one Alhaji was made to sign some documents and was handed a cheque of over N32million. I looked silly to myself and quickly remembered how long I have been pursuing the loan and how much had been spent on transportation.

 A front desk officer was always reluctant to treat my file because I was not ready to give bribe. I saw her being tipped on two different occasions by some customers and prospective ones like me. But I did not relent, afterall I used to listen to motivation speakers who always admonish people not to give up on their dreams and aspirations. Time went by until it became difficult for me to have access to the branch manager again. I spent some weeks monitoring when he would be going out so I would just walk up to him and plead with him to have my loan approved but it was all effort in futility. I actually came across him on two different occasions and he told me he was either going for a meeting or I should see him the following week. I got the signal that he wasn't ready to help and proceeded to start the business through aggressive fund raising from friends and family members who bought into my business idea. I registered with corporate affairs commission (CAC) and the business started to thrive until it was threatened out by security and lack of constant electricity supply.

The small scale entrepreneurs are often faced with stringent loan conditions even on N100,000.00k loan while someone close to the bank manager will just walk in and get a cheque of amount running into millions of Naira. Nigeria killed economic growth ignorantly by failing to engage the financial institutions with grants to empower the entrepreneurs as it is done in developed countries. Where such existed in the past, one of the parties probably reneged on its mandate and thus turned everything to failure. Rather the government focused on monoeconomy that was oil driven for too long.The successive governments are only good at paying lip service to human capacity development.

Had the government been very proactive in ensuring funding of small scale businesses may be many of its myriad of economic problems would have been avoidable. We should have been able to have the electricity problem solved by now if small scale businesses were empowered in the past. Many of these problems are self-inflicted and it's not too late to have them resolved. It is good to attract investors to create jobs; but that's not enough if we keep neglecting human capacity development because that's where the future of the country lies. The pertinent questions to ask is 'what if foreign investors decide to relocate their businesses?'. That's a food for thought to those in position of authority. I expect nothing short of radical approach in that direction of entrepreneurship empowerment.